Armada (Book Review)

Armada by Ernest Cline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First things first: is it as good as Ready Player One? That's kind of a loaded question. I can answer it by saying this is different from Ready Player One. While still definitely science fiction, Armada is firmly rooted in the present (well, 2015, when it was published), whereas Ready Player One exists in a mythical near-future. If you like your sci-fi farther away than the here and now, then no, you probably won't enjoy Armada as much as you enjoyed Ready Player One.

Putting Armada in the "real world" (so to speak) does allow for some great additional pop culture references that wouldn't have otherwise made it in. Pop culture and geeky stuff is one of the things Ernest Cline excels at, so he's doing us all a favor by adding some more. Where Ready Player One had a heavy 80s nostalgia going on, Armada gives us that, some mid-70s nostalgia like Star Wars, and then some more contemporary stuff like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, plus some additional genres -- meaning, we're not just dealing with video game-type nostalgia here, we're dealing with science fiction across movies and games, alien invasions like Close Encounters, Contact, and (of course) Independence Day.

Armada is pretty action-oriented; indeed, most of the major plot events take place over the course of just a few hours, rather days or months. Additionally, if it's hard for you to visualize some things like spaceship cockpits, aerial maneuvers, and fighting techniques (like it is for me), you may start to glaze over (like I did) when Cline's text gets weighed down by his own technical prowess. Even so, I didn't stop reading (finished it in 3 days).

Other possible "cons" -- yes, it is a coming of age story of sorts. So if you don't like reading about teenage white boys attempting to figure out life, you won't like this; thankfully, that aspect is neither forced nor the focus of the story, otherwise my patience would have been spent. And it's definitely a story with some "daddy issues," which Cline's protagonist calls out right away. In fact, he acknowledges a couple of tropes right out of the gate, and some of them even get subverted a bit, which I always appreciate. But "daddy issues" also have their place of honor in most sci-fi canons, so it's not out of place in Armada either.

Last but not least, these are teenage boys, and they speak like teenage boys, most of which I found both realistic and pretty amusing. And possibly indicative that I might also speak like a teenage boy.

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Disney Infinity for Xbox

...or should I say, "Infinitely Boring"??

Last Christmas, my Unit and I bought the Disney Infinity 2.0 game for Xbox 360.  I kept seeing ads for it that looked pretty awesome, and we don't have nearly enough two-player games.  Plus, with all the Marvel characters, what's not to like?!?  We bought the Marvel starter set, and I tried to "limit" myself with number of add-ons, like a good Leonard.  As I picked up Groot and slowly set him on counter, my Unit says, "Where's the raccoon??  You can't have him without the raccoon!!"

"What's a raccoon?  Ain't no thing like me, except me!"

Not too bad for someone who had only seen Guardians of the Galaxy once.  So I raced back to grab Rocket Raccoon, and then I went a little crazy with the characters I "had" to have.  We bought the game and went home.
And we set up the game.
And we tried to figure it out.
And she had a lot of fun playing as Thor and picking up my Iron Man and throwing him across rooms and such.  And we did missions.  And missions.  And more missions.

And then we noticed something:  they were all the fucking same thing.  All missions were basically the same, no matter which game we were playing.  Lots of "shoot 'em up before the time runs out" stuff.  And if you're a ten- or twelve-year-old boy, that might be interesting, but we were bored quickly.  There was no storytelling, little to no problem-solving, definitely no RPG.

And everyone talked about how great the "Toy Box" feature was.  So I took some time to investigate that feature, and it ended with me nearly throwing the Xbox across the room.  It was so clunky and hard to use; it took me some hours just to build Cinderella's castle (and it's only one piece!).  And after all of that, it didn't "do" anything!  I couldn't even go inside or open the doors; it was like reliving my disastrous trip to Disneyland all over again.  What gives?  Frankly, I didn't want to build games; I wanted to play them.  That's kind of the point.

I went online and checked other reviews, and there were people with similar frustrations to mine:  all shoot 'em up repeats, and apparently the 1.0 Toy Box was a lot easier to use and a lot more fun.

We hadn't opened all of the plastic packages, so I suggested we return them for either the cash or a better game.  My Unit insisted we keep them because we might change our minds.  So they've sat -- the unopened boxes, the Disney Infinity console, and several Avengers -- on a bookshelf gathering dust for the past year.

Now (almost a year to the day), I see Disney has released a 3.0 version with Star Wars characters.  I'm not so interested in the new Star Wars characters (NO, Leonard STILL hasn't seen the movie yet!  STOP ASKING!), but I wonder if they brought back some things from 1.0 that were great?  Or made it easier to use or at least more interesting?

What say you, fellow nerds?  Leonard needs your help.